Answers

Some great tips above. Those who have followed me for a while online have witnessed many ideas I have began to develop and then tossed by the wayside. Many domain names and Twitter accounts archived or deleted. There is no problem with transitioning your previous customers to your new venture. You just want to be careful that you do nothing that asks to much of them or creates any confusion. If your previous subscribers were paid, I would suggest offering them some sort of a discount. If there is anything overlapping, don't ask them to pay again. Give them 2.0 for free.

As the others said, it can vary but I have found that one of the fastest ways to grow an audience is to give away some related knowledge. For me, this was creating online courses to provide for free in the areas of photography and online marketing. It does not take a lot of time to do a screencast or a couple of videos teaching something and there are plenty of marketplaces for online learning that have students wanting your content. From two courses I have just shy of 30,000 students and it's still growing. Once you have a decent audience who you trusts you because of what you have taught them, you can ask them to check out your offerings at other marketplaces.

Some of the best clients I have from over the years came to me through some sort of course, article or blog I wrote. Building goodwill and trust with others pays off. When it comes to how much I give away vs. how much information I charge for, I use the 80/20 rule. I give away 80% of what I know for free and charge for the 20% that I feel sets me apart from my competition.

It depends on your long term plans/goals. Assuming that you have aspirations beyond the three books, I would save your personal branded domain for your blog, bio and other information. Use your other domain name for the books. Of course you can link back and forth between them. If the books take off and you want to keep conversations about the books separate from other stuff, it would be hard to do on your own domain name down the road. Though it is a pain to develop and maintain multiple sites, if I was writing books, I would want them to be on their own domain.

I spent 6 years marketing myself as a website designer, then focused more on marketing myself as a photographer for about 5 years and then switched back to focusing on web again. This has been an easier process because I had individual sites for both web design and photography. My own personal domain name was always kept separate and is a collection of my ambitions and life over the years.

In the end, do what you feel best represents what you are about and how you feel the books will be best marketed.

It depends. Can the content be found elsewhere for free? Is it unique content? I give away content for free that I believe people can find elsewhere and charge for unique content. I use the free content to grow my audience.

Depending on the amount of space you have to do the shoot I would suggest one of two lenses and I will explain why I suggest each.

If you have plenty of room, I suggest the Canon 70-200mm 2.8L lens. It is the best option. When you are taking photos of people, you want to avoid distortion. Shooting too wide and standing too close to your subject can produce this. You can kind of fix it in post, but why? Getting the camera further away from the subject is a better option. The 70-200 is such a sharp lens.

If you don't have the room, get the 24-70 2.8L. It's a great lens that I use almost every day. I use it when I am going to be closer to the subject. I almost never use it in the studio unless I am doing a group shot.

Depending on what your budget for a lens is, I would purchase one of the two. If you are not sure about committing to the cost, rent a lens from Borrowlenses.com or Lensprotogo (I am not affiliated with either of these companies, however I have been a customer of both before).

When I was starting out, I did a wide range of work across the full spectrum of knowledge I had on things. I would repair PCs and help people setup home office networks. I hated doing this work because it always resulted in a lot of support calls. Once I had built up my web client customer base to the point where I was managing enough small business websites to sustain a comfortable living, I referred all past work that did not fit into my specialty to local businesses that handled this. This resulted in creating some great relationships that generated referrals for more web clients.

Some of the PC repair clients I had were small businesses who ended up using me to create a website for them.

What do you know how to do? How can you generate some income from it in the interim? Is there any crossover?

Once you are comfortable, you can continue to shed some of the stuff you don't want to continue doing for work.

Depending on what your startup is offering, you could create an online course and put it up for free on a website like Udemy.com. There you can build trust with people who will want to look into what you do professionally. I am a Photographer and Web Designer so I created a free intro course on DSLR Photography and another course on Starting a Facebook Page for your business. Both courses have over 10,000 students and it continues to grow. Once you build up enough of an audience, you can start telling them about other opportunities such as what your start up offers.

If you would like, I can send you my VIP link on here and we can spend 10 minutes chatting about it.

I worked from a home office for 8 years before getting an office and hiring w2 employees. I wish I had focused more on systems earlier because I would have more quickly realized that I do not need a centralized office with employees that work in the same building. Though 75% of us work under the same roof, the way we communicate is the same way we would if everybody was located across the world.

We run multiple Wordpress Multisites and they are very customizable. Assigning custom domains to a Wordpress site is not supported out of the box, but with a domain mapping plugin, you can do it. We have a multisite deployment with 50 sites running on it and all of the sites have their own domain names. The backend url is even mapped so the client does not have to look at your domain. If you have any other questions, let me know. I have been working with Wordpress Multisite since it was Wordpress MU.

It depends. Are these screencasts you are wanting to record? On the Mac, I use Quicktime these days as it is included and seems to be more stable than other solutions. You can also record using the camera on your laptop. I am not sure if you can use Quicktime to record both your screen and your camera at the same time. If you are on a PC, I believe Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 can do this.

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